NEW YORK—For a bunch of knuckleheads, the New York Knicks sure can keep it cool.

You’d assume that when Jason Kidd goes for up a pump-fake and comes down with a bunch of teeth marks in his cranium, the Knicks’ bench might topple over in fits of laughter. The collision Sunday was pretty hilarious, once everyone involved pulled away with all limbs attached.

As it was, the bite of Indiana’s Lance Stephenson shifted, Kidd required seven stitches and wore a crooked headband the rest of the day and the meme @JKiddsHeadband quickly began trending. Rasheed Wallace had to chew on his own gums to keep from uttering spontaneous bursts of non sequitur.

Holding his tongue must be terribly difficult. It sometimes physically makes him ache, because Wallace needs to talk—to shout, to provoke, to needle, to gurgle and grumble, to be heard—almost as often as he needs to exhale. In just a few of his more colorful ruminations in this nascent season he has:

— Yelled "YEAH AFLAC" at Arron Afflalo after the Orlando Magic guard missed a free throw, but alas didn’t follow up the taunt by quacking like a health insurance duck.

— Experienced a stream-of-consciousness dialogue with the Memphis Grizzlies’ bench and fans that was equally hilarious and profane. At one point he turned to the scorer’s table, waved his ring finger and boasted, “I still got it!” Just how did the Knicks and the NBA ever survive without 'Sheed for two whole years?

“It’s crazy,” Wallace said. He was referring not only to his mouth, which rarely stops flapping, but to all that has transpired for the Knicks ever since they lured him out of retirement and rebuilt him into an off-the-bench physical and vocal presence in the low post.

The Knicks’ 7-1 start certainly wouldn’t be as entertaining if Wallace weren’t thick in the mix, trying so very hard to be a good role model while battling with his cranky id. Everyone around him seems revitalized: there is Carmelo Anthony hustling hard on defense, Raymond Felton slimmed down and thrilled to be back in NYC and Kidd pushing prudence on a team bursting with past-due veterans.

They still haven’t allowed more than 94 points in their building. The Knicks held the Pacers to their second-lowest point total of the season Sunday, pulling out a 88-76 victory that had none of the razzamatazz of last year, when Jeremy Lin spun the stretch run into one of the most gripping sports stories ever to transfix New York.

This version fascinates in a whole different way. It has a hard defensive bent, it is one bad back away from disarray and calamity could come crashing down at any moment. But doesn’t half the fun of watching New York sports teams come from viewing the over-the-top angst shared jointly by fans and media? At one point last year, when the Knicks were 8-1 during the height of Linsanity, it seemed as if common sense had been kicked aside, and look at where that got everyone.

Lin is now in Houston, thrilled to have escaped a world where he couldn’t even sneak outside to buy a Gray’s Papaya without being mobbed. Into this cauldron lumbers Wallace, and the first question seems obvious: Is he really that daft?

It can be taken two ways, but Wallace just laughs. He admits to still battling a rebellious streak, one that in his earlier years earned him a technical foul roughly every other game, but now he is 38, and the hairs are silver, and he has children at home who are impressionable and probably shouldn’t watch daddy going loco on live TV.

Wallace was deep into lazy retirement in North Carolina when Mike Woodson, the Knicks coach, called over the summer. “Young fella,” Woodson said to Wallace, “What are you doing?”

It took only some slight arm-twisting to persuade Wallace off his front porch and up north, to training camp with a team that needed some depth in its frontcourt if it ever hoped to survive past the first round of the playoffs. Woodson was an assistant coach in Detroit in 2004, when Wallace won the championship ring he still waves like a sparkler now and then, and their shared history was enticing.

But Wallace’s brilliantly raucous 15-year career had fizzled toward the end of the 2010 season, when with the Celtics he’d cramp up during games and leave exhausted. He hardly seemed like a player who’d revitalize the Knicks or push his way into the hearts of fans still wounded by the graceful Lin’s departure.

On the very first night of the season, as the Garden crowd searched for an escape from the horrors of Sandy, Wallace wasn’t sure what to expect, but then in the final minutes they began playfully chanting his name, and he started shooting aggressively, and showing off old-school basics down in the post.

Listen to them now, rumbling with glee as he sheds his warm-ups. With Amare Stoudemire sidelined, and with Marcus Camby, the other geriatric pick-up, still out of shape, Wallace has fit in ably as the go-to option down low. He’s averaging 7.3 points and 3.8 rebounds in 13.5 minutes per game, hardly rough trade considering his last professional game before coming out of retirement was in the 2010 NBA Finals.

Wallace is the first big man off the bench, a Garden favorite because of his rigid interior defense, his strong perimeter shooting and a personality that can make the puppets from Avenue Q blush. He admits to sounding like old uncle Ed in the corner chair at Thanksgiving dinner, pining for the days when basketball was more than high-flying dunks and rounds and rounds of traveling.

Don’t even get him started on the footwork of today’s kids. He swears that’s part of the reason he bounced out of retirement, because he couldn’t stand to see the sport besmirched.

"I was a huge Patrick Ewing fan. That's what made me sway this way,” Wallace told reporters Sunday, slipping back into a time when the Knicks dominated the NY sports scene. “You had Oak, you had J-Starks ... It was an all-around good team and they played hellified defense. That's what I liked about them."

These Knicks will never be those Knicks, but there’s still something compelling about them. They’re ridiculously old, and eventually they’ll have to figure out where a healthy Stoudemire fits, but who wouldn’t want to have that problem? Wallace, that young fella, becomes even more loquacious as he ponders the possibilities.

“It’s just a matter of time before everyone buys into it. You have a defensive coach, two defensive assistant coaches—so it’s just a matter of time before everyone buys into it. Once we all do, it’s going to be hellacious,” he said, again spinning his latest favorite word.

Wallace was never voted most likely to become an elder statesman, but now here he is, dropping wisdom on a team that over the years has been known to lose its mind. Crazy hardly does this story justice.